Early Doors - Your morning briefing blog

Bring back the 1990s

Mon Mar 09 08:26AM

Expect much self-congratulatory back-slapping this week when a minimum of three Premier League clubs reach the last eight of the Champions League.

It is impossible to deny that English club football is the strongest in the world, but is that really a good thing?

Early Doors could go in a number of directions with this particular hot potato - a lack of opportunities for homegrown players; 'lesser' clubs getting an ever-smaller slice of TV revenues; even the crushing dullness that comes with three English teams in the Champions League semis.

But how about this: English football just isn't much fun to watch any more.

The statistics suggest the Premier League is far from the undisputed entertainment capital it once was. This season, goals have been scored at 2.44 per game, nearly half a goal less than La Liga.

But the problem is not so much the lack of goals as the way the unpredictability and entertainment have been sucked out.

English football is a jaffa cake, and some greedy sod has whipped the orangey bit off the top while nobody was looking, leaving nothing but a dull, spongey base.

ED has been fortunate enough to see some cracking foreign games over the last couple of weeks (and unfortunate enough to watch them on a TV in some dank office in the South-West London hinterland).

Anyway, a week or so ago it saw an amazing 3-3 draw between Inter and Roma in which Mourinho's boys came back from 2-0 and 3-1 down.

By the end, the Special One was beside himself on account of the complete tactical anarchy on display, and not even the absence of Francesco Totti and Zlatan Ibrahimovic could dampen an absolutely barnstorming encounter.

ED would have called it the game of the season, had Atletico Madrid not minutes earlier completed a frankly preposterous 4-3 victory against Barcelona, in which both sides showcased their 50s throwback 2-3-5 formation.

This Saturday just gone, Atletico were at it again in a rollicking derby draw against Real Madrid that the 1-1 scoreline didn't even come close to doing justice. Atleti were only prevented from winning handsomely by the hopeless finishing of Diego Forlan (some things never change) and Sergio Aguero's decision to stop playing and appeal for a penalty when he could just as easily have taken a shot.

In fact these games resembled a rather more recent time than the 50s - the Premier League in the 90s; a time when teams attacked without thinking about the consequences, flair players had time on the ball, and the tyranny of pace, strength and size had not taken hold.

Were the likes of Matt Le Tissier, Gianfranco Zola and Dennis Bergkamp truly world class? Who cares? The Premiership might have little more than a retirement home for ageing stars, but it was a bloody exciting one.

A decade on, we have just endured one of the most turgid weekends of football imaginable.

Chelsea's FA Cup sixth round win at Coventry was so completely lacking in drama that ITV would have been better off showing 90 minutes of Tic Tac adverts.

Just when it looked like conclusions could not get any more foregone, Manchester United ambled to a humiliatingly easy 4-0 win at Fulham. Roy Hodgson's men are supposed to be good at home, but this was more one-sided than a Soviet show trial.

United are supposed to have the most devastating attacking force since the Visigoths, but we very rarely get to see it in full flow, even in a thrashing of Fulham.

Teams are so petrified of getting caught on the break that they retreat en masse to their own penalty box.

So United never score from the kind of thrilling end-to-end move in which the team of Eric Cantona, Andrei Kanchelskis and junior Ryan Giggs used to specialise - they just pass it around the opposition half unchallenged and then somebody knocks it in from the edge of the box.

You can't argue with the effectiveness of this tactic, but it is all just a bit tame.

Sunday was no better. Arsenal's win against Burnley was predictably convincing, but even Everton's comeback against Middlesbrough bore the hallmark of wearying predictability.

Down 1-0 at half-time, David Moyes brought a decent attacker - Louis Saha - off the bench and within 15 minutes the Toffees were in front. Easy.

The Premier League supposedly finds itself under attack from the credit crunch and UEFA generalissimo Michel Platini - but if fate conspires to take the Greatest Show On Earth^TM down a peg or two, it could be good news for everybody.

- - -

QUOTE OF THE DAY: Ronaldo bigs himself up after scoring his first goal for Corinthians. He was booked for excessive celebration. "I'm very sorry for the incident, but I couldn't contain my emotions. Putting modesty aside for a moment, I dominated (the ball) to perfection. If I didn't know how to do this, I wouldn't have got where I am today."

FOREIGN VIEW: Four players were sent off as River Plate beat Arsenal 3-1 in a stormy encounter in Argentina's Clausura championship.

Luciano Leguizamon put Arsenal ahead from a penalty in first-half stoppage time after a foul by Nicolas Sanchez, who was sent off.

Despite being a man down, River replied with a Radamel Falcao Garcia header and a delightful chip from Marcelo Gallardo early in the second half.

Arsenal had Sergio Sena sent off for a foul on Gallardo in the 73rd minute and River Plate substitute Rodrigo Archubi, who had only been on for 10 minutes, followed immediately for lashing out at an opponent.

Gallardo added a third in the 77th minute before Arsenal had defender Anibal Matellan sent off for a second bookable offence.

Defending champions Boca Juniors also had two players dismissed in a 2-0 defeat at lowly Independiente.

COMING UP: No live football today, but stick around as we wrap up a (hopeless) weekend with an FA Cup team of the week, winners and losers and all manner of feature-based fun.

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